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This two-day colloquium will look at how and why Egyptian statues were originally displayed or kept invisible, transported, transformed or buried, with recent research and discoveries providing significant new insights.

Beyond typological and stylistic discourses on Egyptian statuary, considering their architectural, cultic and production contexts can prove both fascinating and instructive. Analysing statuary within context can shed light on religious or cultural practices, and the political or economic agenda behind the display or hiding of these sculptures – the divine cult statue within its shrine and nurtured daily by the priests or carried in procession during festivals, colossal royal statues before temples, statues of the deceased in their funerary chapel, or the presence of smaller statuary within domestic contexts.

New discoveries, the recontextualisation of earlier excavated statues and recent scientific analyses provide significant new insights into the production, meaning and (re)uses of statues. The colloquium will encompass the full typological and chronological range – from the Predynastic period to Late Antiquity – and include statuary of all scales, from royal colossi to figurines. The papers will cover statues set up in temples, palaces, houses and tombs, and the secondary spaces for the placement of these statues, closely looking at the relationships between the type or style of a statue and their contexts.